What's Your Diet Type?

Use the Power of your Personality to Discover Your Best Way to Lose Weight

By Heather K. Jones, R.D.

If dieting were easy, we’d all look like Heidi Klum. Instead, we’re a nation suffering from obesity and type 2 diabetes. But we’re also a population who is big on hope and optimism. So when a new diet book comes around and the timing is right—such as January 1, 2010—we’re willing to give the whole diet drama another chance.

What’s Your Diet Type? appeals to us because it’s cerebral, separating people into types on the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator. If you’re not big on psychoanalysis and Jungian personality types, you may not be familiar with this concept. On its most basic level, it determines whether you are an introvert or extrovert, whether you prefer common sense over theories, whether you’re analytic or a dreamer, whether you like order or prefer randomness. In the end, you end up with four letters that sum up your tendencies, for instance, in our case: INTJ, which stands for introverted, intuitive, feeling "judger." That means we procrastinate, rebel against the very idea of weight loss and have trouble staying on course.

What’s Your Diet Type? has the solution through lots of psychological insight, little mind exercises, case studies and other detailed theories. We like it, but that doesn’t mean reading it will cause anyone to lose weight. The reason we enjoy it is because we’d rather read about why we have such trouble sticking to a diet than actually subjecting ourselves to one. But in the end, it’s a fascinating read, and if you have never explored these personality concepts, you’ll learn a lot. We much prefer it to eating only bacon or grapefruits or cookies. (Yes, there’s a cookie diet. No, we’re not publishing it.) And, armed with insight into our diet behavior, we might actually change our procrastinating ways in 2010, thanks to Myer-Briggs and Heather Jones.